PEEK: Picking Essential frames via Efficient Knowledge distillation

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Steunou, Killian, Razzouki, Anas Filali, Guetari, Khalil, El-Yacoubi, Mounîm A., Tevissen, Yannis
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
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author Steunou, Killian
Razzouki, Anas Filali
Guetari, Khalil
El-Yacoubi, Mounîm A.
Tevissen, Yannis
author_facet Steunou, Killian
Razzouki, Anas Filali
Guetari, Khalil
El-Yacoubi, Mounîm A.
Tevissen, Yannis
contents Video-language models can process only a limited number of frames, making frame selection a key bottleneck for efficient video captioning. Most captioning pipelines still rely on uniform sampling, which is computationally cheap but agnostic to visual content. Adaptive frame sampling has recently emerged as a promising approach for selecting the most informative frames from a video; however, existing methods remain computationally expensive. We introduce PEEK, an efficient dynamic frame sampling method that distills caption-conditioned frame relevance rankings from a stronger teacher model into a lightweight temporal model that operates only on visual content. We find that, overall, on ActivityNet Captions and MSR-VTT, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all evaluated downstream vision language models, especially when only one or two frames are selected for captioning, obtaining the best CIDEr for most frame budgets. On ActivityNet Captions, PEEK is particularly strong, winning 14 out of 16 configurations. Zero-shot evaluation on MSR-VTT shows that our model transfers best at low frame budgets, while results at four and eight frames are more mixed as temporal coverage and visual diversity become increasingly competitive. Compared with recent adaptive baselines, PEEK is both more accurate in the low-budget regime and more efficient: it adds only $5.2\%$ to the captioning time, compared with $65.4\%$ for CSTA and $211.9\%$ for MaxInfo. We release our code and pre-trained checkpoint at https://github.com/momentslab/peek.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31029
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publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PEEK: Picking Essential frames via Efficient Knowledge distillation
Steunou, Killian
Razzouki, Anas Filali
Guetari, Khalil
El-Yacoubi, Mounîm A.
Tevissen, Yannis
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Video-language models can process only a limited number of frames, making frame selection a key bottleneck for efficient video captioning. Most captioning pipelines still rely on uniform sampling, which is computationally cheap but agnostic to visual content. Adaptive frame sampling has recently emerged as a promising approach for selecting the most informative frames from a video; however, existing methods remain computationally expensive. We introduce PEEK, an efficient dynamic frame sampling method that distills caption-conditioned frame relevance rankings from a stronger teacher model into a lightweight temporal model that operates only on visual content. We find that, overall, on ActivityNet Captions and MSR-VTT, our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods across all evaluated downstream vision language models, especially when only one or two frames are selected for captioning, obtaining the best CIDEr for most frame budgets. On ActivityNet Captions, PEEK is particularly strong, winning 14 out of 16 configurations. Zero-shot evaluation on MSR-VTT shows that our model transfers best at low frame budgets, while results at four and eight frames are more mixed as temporal coverage and visual diversity become increasingly competitive. Compared with recent adaptive baselines, PEEK is both more accurate in the low-budget regime and more efficient: it adds only $5.2\%$ to the captioning time, compared with $65.4\%$ for CSTA and $211.9\%$ for MaxInfo. We release our code and pre-trained checkpoint at https://github.com/momentslab/peek.
title PEEK: Picking Essential frames via Efficient Knowledge distillation
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31029